I think a little clarification is needed. No. I don’t actually think everyone there is insane. I don’t care about the bans so stop trying to use that. HB enthusiasts coming here and trying to call me out achieves nothing besides proving my point
Edit: Feel free to keep trying to brigade me. It’s not going to scare me to take this down
What is a ‘tankie’?
the original origin of the term was a group british communists attacking anyone who supported the Soviet Union’s crushing of the hungarian uprising in 1956. it then morphed into a term used to attack anyone who supports the use of force and authority in general to suppress counter revolutionaries. it’s final degeneration is that it is now used to attack anyone to the left of an american democrat like facebones said.
https://redsails.org/tankies/
here is a good article about it. To be clear: this is written from the perspective of a marxist leninist, who are normally the number one target of being called a “tankie”. Still, it is very short, and redsails is a really cool website that has the footnotes with citations pop up as you read long
Did not know about this site. It was a nice read and their mission statement is cool. Thanks for sharing! :)
o7 happy to hear that!
In theory, the things the other replies said.
In practice, anything left of the average Lemmy.world liberal/democrat.
I don’t Lemmy enough to say there are zero hexbear users who are pro China or pro wtfever people say, but I see almost none of the ridiculous shit the rest of Lemmy claim exclusively happens there. What I DO see is liberals (usually from lemmy.world if we’re swinging at instances) talking ridiculous trollish shit to hexbear users than using the silly trollish responses they get in response to justify these “all hexbears want to give America to Xi Jinping” posts.
I dunno, I ended up blocking the instance way before I knew about their reputation (like, when I first joined Lemmy) because all of the users their kept posting the most unhinged shit.
I have definitely seen blatant apologism for China/Russia from them.
FWIW, I’m much further left than your average Democrat (I consider myself a leftist/anarchist). I personally don’t consider what I’ve seen from them to be very “left”, just authoritarian.
I was sure to not be an absolutist for a reason, I’m not always cruising Lemmy. Hexbear in particular absolutely has a sense of humor sometimes that I myself am a bit old for, but judging them for that is very much more “Old man yelling at clouds” than anything. If you don’t like it, sure, but that doesn’t say A or B about them.
Maybe there’s blatant apologism, but in my experience it’s people taking whatever scraps they can find to claim “Apologism.” For example, discussing high speed rail development in China. Admiring a rail system isn’t “blatant apologism,” but most lemmy liberals would call it as such, because it was built by China. It’s like calling me a Putin apologist for discussing Dostoyevsky. Yes, I’m admiring a creation of the country or it’s culture, but I’m not saying that their current governments are the only way forward or really saying anything about governance at all.
Again, I’m not claiming you haven’t seen something “blatant” before (I could name so many one off events I’ve witnessed that don’t hold to norms,) I’m just saying that people claiming it to be this widespread norm on every leftist instance are spreading disinformation.
Sure, perhaps it’s possible that I saw an unusually high amount of apologists, but I’m saying that it happened enough times and consistently enough that it prompted me to block them before I even knew anything about them, which I think at least says something. I won’t claim to know what the majority opinion there is, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that it’s an abnormal amount.
As I mentioned, I’d be inclined to wonder what you’re considering “apologism.” The fact that you didn’t address the points I made makes me think you fall into that camp of boiling an intentionally wide array of ideas, conversation, etc down to “apologism” to take up arms against instances you don’t like. I see discussion of those countries, and examples of things that are happening there, but not one time have I seen people celebrating violence or excusing it on either hexbear or .ml.
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Apologists for Chinese/Russian government.
“Leftists” who are more interested in authoritarianism than leftism. At their very worst, they even ally with the far-right.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
“Authoritarianism is when people want things, not when government exerts force!”
Are you saying that Marx and Engels weren’t Leftists?
Not at all. They were wrong on certain things, which people like Stalin used to justify his own horrible stuff.
You’re linked a direct refutation on “anti-authouritarians” from Engels. Marx and Engels were criticized as “Authoritarian” by Anarchists of their era. Either Marx and Engels were Authoritarian in your eyes and thus not Leftists, or the Authoritarian argument itself is misplaced as a thought-terminating cliche as Engels points out, that avoids grappling with the Marxist theory of the State.
You might wanna work on your reading comprehension if that is what you get from Engels text
Someone ideologically somewhere between his greatest heroes, Stalin and Mao.
Apologists for authoritarian regimes that have either historically been communist or paint themselves as such currently.
Or as far as most of .world is concerned, anyone to the left of Joe Manchin.
Pro-China sycophants. They’d be the ones driving the tanks at Tiananman Square.
I’d also argue that these people only put up a facade of being leftist. I’ve never once seen a hexbear user actually make arguments for leftist policies, socialism, or communism. They just shitpost a bunch of anti-American memes and rally for the Russian and Chinese governments.
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I’m not familiar with UniversalMonk. Why do you think they’re a government paid shill?